What does UConn owe Hartford? Maybe nothing

Who is UConn basketball’s biggest rival?

For the men’s team, many fans would say Syracuse. The teams have a long history together, and they’ve both achieved great success. Syracuse, though, already has an archrival, in Georgetown, and UConn and Syracuse don’t play all that often these days.

Many Husky fans long considered Duke a top rival, but Duke is like the Yankees — loved by some, loathed by everyone else.

UConn has moved conferences a bit, and over the years the likes of Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Miami and even Southern Methodist University could claim to be Connecticut’s top rival. All have faded into the past. These days you get fans trying to gin up a rivalry with Creighton, but though they’re both good teams, it feels like forcing things a bit. (Omaha? C’mon.)

The truth is the UConn men have no top rival. And that’s fine.

The women’s team doesn’t really, either. Whoever else is great nationally serves that purpose — yesterday, Tennessee; today, South Carolina; tomorrow, who knows.

The better question, from a public policy standpoint, is where UConn should play when it faces its rival du jour.

UConn has two home courts — Gampel Pavilion, at its main Storrs campus, and the XL Center, in downtown Hartford. Each can be electrifying under the right circumstances. Gampel is much better for students, while the XL Center is more convenient to the rest of the state. The XL Center also has thousands more seats.

But those thousands of extra seats don’t pay off for UConn. As university President Radenka Maric has made clear recently, UConn pays for the privilege of playing off campus, either in Hartford or, for the football team, at Rentschler Field in East Hartford. A university spokeswoman told the school newspaper that UConn spent about $4 million playing in these arenas in the last academic year.

The university pays rent at the XL Center, about $40,000 per basketball game, which adds up. The school also gets nothing from concessions or parking, as it would if the games were held on campus.

All this would be interesting if somewhat academic were it not for the enormous deficits the UConn athletic department has been running up lately, which totaled $53 million in the last fiscal year. That extra money has to come from somewhere, and with rising tuition a major concern, it’s something the state needs to get under control.

Much of UConn’s deficit is from circumstances outside its control. The school went big on football just in time for its previous home in the Big East Conference to collapse around it. The headline basketball teams spent years in the American Athletic Conference wilderness alongside the likes of Tulsa and East Carolina. It didn’t help that both football and men’s basketball recently went through some of their worst seasons in memory.

Much of that has turned around. Basketball is back in the Big East, and winning. Football is independent, and also, somehow, winning games. (UConn’s qualification for a bowl game this past season must count among the more improbable sporting phenomena in state history.) The women’s team keeps chugging along as always.

Still, the financial deficit has remained. It’s worth asking why in such a circumstance the university should pay for the privilege of a second home court a half-hour away from campus.

The recent contretemps over the president’s threat to stop playing in Hartford provided an answer — legislators, apparently, very much enjoy the chance to take in a game close to their workplace.

Maric’s pronouncement that UConn would stop playing in Hartford if the governor’s funding didn’t keep up with current levels was treated as a “gaffe” at the Capitol, with lawmakers providing a master class in condescension and internalized misogyny in response to her audacity. “We all, me included, make mistakes sometimes,” one legislative leader said. “She’s new,” said another.

For the record, in addition to being president of the state’s flagship university, Maric is an internationally recognized scientist, is fluent in four languages and has received more than $40 million in research grants over the years. Of course she can make mistakes, but why they assume she didn’t know exactly what she was doing is another question.

To everyone else, Maric raised some important issues about UConn’s role. What does it owe Hartford? It’s true that UConn games are a boon to downtown, but is that what the school is supposed to be spending millions of dollars a year to support? The XL Center is years past its prime, the Whalers are never coming back and Hartford is something less than a boomtown. Is any of that UConn’s fault?

It’s true that the university needs state funding, but that ought to be considered an obligation of the General Assembly, not something it dangles over the school to get what it wants.

It would be more convenient if Storrs weren’t in the middle of nowhere, but we’re about 150 years too late to change that. In the meantime, Hartford would appear to need UConn much more than UConn needs Hartford.

It may be as simple as this: Lawmakers will keep funding UConn as long as the teams play locally. That means part of your $30,000-plus annual cost to attend the school is going toward boosting business for Hartford bars and restaurants.

Whatever ends up happening, credit UConn’s president for finally getting that out in the open.